For twenty-five years, the United States had nothing new to call a fibre. The Federal Trade Commission, which decides what may legally appear on a clothing label, had not established a new generic fibre classification since the early 2000s. In September it approved one: renoa, made by a New York startup called Everbloom.
The classification matters more than it sounds. Fibre names are regulated vocabulary. A garment may only be labelled cashmere if the fibre is cashmere, and a genuinely new material has no legal name to print until the FTC grants one. Without renoa, a substitute could only ever be sold as a blend of "unknown" or smuggled under a name it is not — which is why the approval, not the fabric, is the milestone.
What the material actually is: waste protein, ground up. Everbloom collects cashmere and wool scraps along with down and feather "lint" left over from the bedding industry, processes it into a powder, blends that with a biodegradable biopolymer, and extrudes the mixture to the length and diameter of a chosen natural fibre. The company says it developed its own AI model for materials science and that a cashmere substitute is the first product out of it.
TechCrunch's Tim De Chant, who visited Everbloom's Manhattan office last month, handled a crewneck, a pair of knit gloves and a scarf. The sweater and gloves were soft and light. The scarf was the interesting object: knitted to test the material, worn and washed for months by co-founder and CEO Sim Gulati, and put through a tumble dryer before the visit. It had not pilled, and Gulati said it had not shrunk — a punishment a pure cashmere scarf would not survive.
The commercial plan is more modest than the milestone. The first products, expected in the second quarter of 2027, will most likely use renoa as a minority blend — around 20 percent alongside cashmere — rather than as a standalone fibre. Gulati told TechCrunch that the 80/20 blend he showed felt extremely close to the real thing and that commercial finishing should close the remaining gap without costing the washability.
Why anyone is trying: cashmere has become an ordinary luxury, with prices spanning from a $50 crewneck to a $7,900 cable-knit cardigan, and Loro Piana alone helping to push its parent LVMH division above an €11 billion valuation. The supply side is less glamorous. The goats that produce the fibre have been degrading rangelands across Central Asia, which makes any route to the cashmere feel that does not require more goats worth attempting.
The caveats are the usual ones for a promising material. The durability evidence so far is one scarf, worn by the chief executive who has an interest in it surviving. The biopolymer that carries the protein powder is described as biodegradable, but its own footprint, and the energy cost of grinding, blending and extruding, are not in the pitch. Scaling from a lab in Manhattan to a textile supply chain is where most new fibres die. And no price has been announced.
Still, a new word on a label is a rare thing, and it is the point at which a laboratory material becomes something a factory can order.
